What if Jounouchi Were Actually From Brooklyn
by Baxaronn
Summary: "Joey Wheeler"'s adventures in actual New York City. As opposed to fake New York City or Undisclosed Generic United States Location. Because according to 4Kid's, everyone on earth is from an Undisclosed Generic United States Location. T for the occasional 'bad word'. Also potentially a crossover with GX and ZEXAL, in the future. Newest chapter is Union Square: Joey vs Esper Roba
1. Brighton Beach

"Wheeler?"

Joey looks up from his AM newspaper at the sound of his name. It's the barista, calling for him from behind the counter at the Starbucks he was supposed to meet his friends in ten minutes ago. None of them have arrived yet, which is strange, because he's usually the one who shows up the latest. But then again, none of the rest of his friends live in Brooklyn, so it would naturally take them longer to arrive than it would him. The N train, apparently, is running local for the next two weeks, so it won't be surprising even if everyone shows up an hour late.

"Wheeler!" the barista shouts, plopping the cup of coffee down and disappearing into a back room. Joey folds up his paper and gets up to get his drink. His name is scrawled in black marker across the logo, for some reason. Fuckin' weirdo. They don't even usually ask for names. Whatever.

On the way back to his table, he bumps into a burly middle aged man in a stained beater. The man turns to him, lip curled into his bushy grey mustache, and curses at him in Russian. Well, Joey assumes he's cursing at him, because he doesn't know what those words meant, but they sounded aggressive and what else would the guy be saying right now anyway?

Not in the mood for a fight, Joey apologizes. "Sorry, buddy," he says, and tries to move on. But the man doesn't let up, and keeps yelling at him long after he's walked across the room back to his seat. The man follows him, yelling words Joey doesn't understand, until the only way he can get him off his back is to leave the cafe and cross the street. The man stays behind, probably for the sake of an order he already placed, and Joey escapes successfully.

"Jesus H. Christ, what a fucking psycho," he says to himself, looking both ways before strolling across the four-lane street during a green light in the middle of the sidewalk. A car slows down for him, and the driver leans an arm out the window to flip him off. He flips them off right back, and continues his leisurely pace to the other side of the avenue.

In front of the 99 Cent store is an old woman wrapped in a heavy shawl trying to talk to him. He hears one or two words before she is cut off by the downtown train pulling into the station above them. She doesn't try to speak again until it's gone, at which point the uptown train lands in the opposite direction. Joey watches a pigeon pick through a pile of discarded bagels on the curb, wondering if there's any chance this woman has anything to say that he actually needs to stay and listen to. He determines that she doesn't, and decides to sit and wait on the boardwalk for the next twenty minutes instead of going back into the Starbucks. Yugi is coming all the way from Riverdale. There is no way in hell he's getting here within the hour.


	2. DeKalb Avenue

Joey stands alone in the downtown DeKalb station with a hundred other people milling around and waiting for their trains. A man with a baby strapped to his chest stands to the left, checking his watch every fifteen seconds. A woman with a small dog in her purse paces back and forth to the right, also checking her watch at rapid intervals. Several groups of Brooklyn Tech students stand around each other, talking loudly and eating one-dollar pizza they got above ground off of paper plates. There hasn't been a downtown train for an entire fifteen minutes.

"Where is the train," Joey grumbles under his breath. He walks up to the yellow edge of the platform and peers into the tunnel, searching for the telltale headlights of the approaching train. He sighs when he doesn't see them and backs away from the tracks. He looks down the other end of the platform and sees a rat walking along the railing. He watches it for a few seconds, walks back to the platform edge to look for the train, and still sees no sign of it. "Ugh, where the fuck is the train?"

It's possible that he would feel less impatient if he had his friends to talk to while he waited, but all of them live uptown in relation to him. Occasionally he'll bring someone to his neighborhood to hang out, but since most of them live in Manhattan or the Bronx they usually go where more people won't be inconvenienced by the long trip. Most of the time, he's riding the downtown train completely alone.

Which is why it's surprising to him when he sees Duke walking up the platform towards him, clutching his school bag under one arm and a paper bag of churros in his other hand, mouthing "oh my god where is the train" to himself and staring at the floor. Joey waves to him and shouts his name, happy to finally have someone to talk to on the way out of school on a day besides Friday.

"Hey Dookie, what's up? Why ya headed downtown, don't you live in the heights?" Joey asks. Duke looks up and grins in acknowledgement, takes a bite out of one of his churros, and swallows it before replying.

"Stop calling me that," he says. "Yeah, I do, I'm not going home right away. I have to go to Coney Island for something, but there hasn't been an R train in a decade."

"Tell me about it," Joey sighs. "I didn't know there was a churro guy, where are they?"

"Follow me." Duke turns around and leads Joey towards the closest staircase. Underneath it is a woman standing behind a table, her hands buried in the pockets of her baby blue hoodie, looking bored. On the table is a pile of churros covered in plastic, two pairs of tongs resting on top. Duke approaches her and says something in Spanish that results in her exchanging a bag of two churros for one of Duke's dollars. He gives it to Joey, who tries to pay him for it with quarters but is refused.

"It's just a dollar," he explains. "You can buy me something later."

"Thanks."

"Forget it, man. God, where's the fucking train anyway, is it _supposed_ to be delayed?"

"Hell if I know, I've already been down here for twenty minutes."

It is another ten minutes before the Q train arrives, and neither of them need it, so they wait another ten minutes for the R train that is now forty minutes late. At least, that's how long they think it took; neither of them are wearing a watch right now.


	3. Stapleton

Crow looks out onto the sea, at the remnants of the unfinished bridge. A salty breeze blows his unruly hair into Jack's arm, and he swats at it with his hands and sneers.

"Tie up your hair, you freak," he whines. Crow pouts at him, but chooses not to reply other than by obliging. He takes a blue produce rubber band, gathers his hair into it, and then immediately renders this courtesy pointless by walking away from Jack so he can get even closer to the coast. The water laps against the rocks, drawing in garbage from between them and depositing other garbage on top of them. He'd heard once before that this beach used to be some kind of historical landmark, but it was completely desecrated by the explosion because it was so close to it. Someone else said that this beach was just a parking lot, and the landmark was at least a mile or two away from here. Either way it was destroyed, so it doesn't particularly matter where it was. Now it's just another sector on Satellite Island for them to take over.

"What are you staring at?" Kalin asks, joining him on his rock and peering out in the direction of Crows gaze. "Looking for boats?"

"Don't even bother asking, Kalin," Jack says, his strange accent slipping for a moment into something somewhat normal sounding. No one is sure when or why he decided to try make himself sound Australian; no one even knew it was supposed to be Australian, or what Australia was, until they met the man he learned it from. Regardless, it's weird, and all three of them are always at least a little relieved every time he drops it in favor of sounding like a normal Satellite Islander, because of the affirmation that he hasn't finally permanently trained himself into a fake accent. Jack walks over and stands next to them, hoping the stray cats that have congregated around his ankles won't follow him onto the uneven, wet, rocky beach. Most of them stay behind, but one brave, water-resistant cat follows him and attaches its side to his leg. It looks up at him with one closed, collapsed pair of eyelids and one small yellow eye with a round pupil inset. Jack grimaces at the cat, nudges it away with his boot, and stares out to sea as well. "You'd think he'd be more interested in something that moves, like a boat, but no. He's always staring at the same thing."

Kalin smirks at him and laughs right in his face. "Right, like you don't spend twice as much time as him staring into space. You spend entire _days_ doing nothing but glaring at the wall in the library."

After another minute of staring off to the left, where the water is filled with debris of destroyed ships, Yusei turns to the right, where everyone else is staring, and walks over to join them. Unlike the docks, where the wreckage is piled high in a monumental sculpture of twisted orange metal, the damage from the collapse of the bridge is mostly submerged underwater. All they can see is the unfinished reconstruction; a sad, unstable arm reaching out to the borough that Yusei is pretty sure is Brooklyn. It always takes him a second or two to differentiate which landmass he's looking at.

"They'll finish rebuilding the Verrazano one day, Crow," Yusei says, the last to join them on the edge of the water. "They'll find a way, I'm sure."

Crow looks back at his friends, a small smile on his lips. "I didn't even say a god damn thing and here you are trying to make this shit sentimental," he says. "Everything do'n't have to be a fucking 'moment', moron."

Jack scoffs, puts his fist on his hip. "Like you weren't making it sentimental enough with your puppy-eyed shit you had going on there."

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you too."

"Fuck you both."

"Fuck all three of you."

"Fuck."


	4. Union Square

It's the first day of Battle City, and already things are heated up to hell. Of course, people had seen crowds this large in Union Square before, but no one currently present could remember a time when traffic was diverted away from 14th street, and the lack of honking horns and daring jaywalkers almost getting run over by semi-trucks was conspicuous and disconcerting to everyone. At least, it was for a few seconds, until they all got used to it and immediately took advantage of the extra space by filling every spare inch so they could watch the duels in progress.

There are two duels going on at the moment; one of them is outside, in the actual square, the other inside of the Virgin Records across the street. Virgin, not only one of the first places to actually sell Duel Disks, turned out to be a good arena for public duels once the Disks had been bought. The open floor above the escalators provided a convenient space for Solid Vision that could be seen from all parts of the first floor, once the shelving units had been rearranged, and from below, when they stopped the escalators and used them as seating for spectators. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best indoor arena in the neighborhood, and it was one of the only stores that welcomed the swarm of duelists besides Forbidden Planet. It was also the store that had given Esper Roba's siblings permission to perch on top of the building so they could watch the duel without getting lost in the crowd.

Through his binoculars, his oldest younger brother, Enzo, watches the duel between his brother and that blond guy. It's hard to give Roba (Roberto, actually; Roba is a stage name) the information he wants when he has to talk so quietly into a device that comes out static-y in the earpiece it connects to no matter how carefully he enunciates. But quiet he must be, because they're being watched by a Virgin employee who was sent up with them to make sure they don't do anything stupid. Enzo resents it a little that they management doesn't trust them just because they're a group of little kids, but at the same time knows that they came up here to help their brother cheat in a tournament that the store's corporation is sponsoring, and therefore doesn't feel entitled to his anger. He's still angry, of course, but he doesn't do anything about it besides grudgingly accept the presence of the chaperone and try to cheat as subtly as possible.

His irritation disappears when his brother breaks out his trump card, Jinzo. Now there's no way he'll lose! If he wins two duels in a row, it'll be the start of an awesome winning streak! Everyone will be blown away! Down below Enzo can see that his opponent is frozen. He hasn't drawn his next card even though it's his turn, and he's not even looking at his hand! Actually, he seems really mad, which is a little weird. Curious, Enzo turns up his listening device, which was for some reason on a very low volume, so he can hear more clearly what the problem is. The sound comes in with a crackle of static.

"—fuck did you just call me?!" Joey Wheeler, the opponent, yells into his ear. Down on the ground his actions are just as aggressive as his words; Enzo can see him clenching his fist and shaking it in his brother's direction. "You askin' for something? 'Cause I'll kick your ass, if that's what you want! Huh?!"

Roba's face falls from it's triumphant smirk into a bemused frown. "I didn't call you anything," he says. "I only said I was summoning a monster."

Wheeler isn't having that. "Don't even try to backtrack now, I _heard_ you callin' me ginzo!"

"Woah, I was just-"

"You were just _what_?" Wheeler's voice comes through as a cloud of fuzz in Enzo's earpiece, and he's shouting so loudly that he has to turn the volume down every time he takes his turn talking. "I didn't do nothing to you, buddy, so let's keep the commentary a little friendlier than that, okay?"

Visibly relieved that he is no longer being threatened, a tiny half-smile returns to Roba's face. "Yeah, okay…as I was saying, Jinzo is summoned in attack mode. Yeah."

Just as he was about to regain his temper, Wheeler loses it again. "Didn't I tell you I'd kick your ass if you called me that again?! _How did you even know I'm Italian!?_"

"You're Italian?"

"Yes! What, you don't think I am?"

"I just, your name is Wheeler, so I didn't think-"

"If you thought I was something else, why are you calling me a ginzfghlgzzzzphhphhzzz—"

Enzo's earpiece hisses suddenly, so loudly that he has to pull it out of his ear. It's okay for now, they're not dueling anyway, so he doesn't put it back as soon as the sound is back to normal. He feels bad for his brother, getting caught in such a weird argument; he doesn't even understand what Wheeler is so mad about. That's something his mom used to call her parents and her brother all the time back when they were alive, and it never upset them at all. Enzo doesn't know what to make of it, but he hopes the argument ends soon so he can listen to what's going on without risking this guy breaking his eardrums every time he screams.


End file.
